Sophia by Hanson Robotics

Sophia is a Hanson Robotics’s latest human-like robot, created by combining innovations in science, engineering and artistry. Sophia is a personification of dreams for the future of AI, as well as a framework for advanced AI and robotics research, and an agent for exploring human-robot experience in service and entertainment applications.

In some ways, she is human-crafted science fiction character depicting where AI and robotics are heading. In other ways, Sophia is real science, springing from the serious engineering and science research and accomplishments of an inspired team of robotics & AI scientists and designers.

Artificial Intelligence

Sophia’s real AI combines cutting-edge work in symbolic AI, neural networks, expert systems, machine perception, conversational natural language processing, adaptive motor control and cognitive architecture among others. As Sophia’s underlying AI components can be combined in different ways, her responses can be unique to any given situation or interaction. She also utilizes cutting edge machine perception that allows to recognize human faces, see emotional expressions, and recognize various hand gestures. Sophia can estimate your feelings during a conversation, and try to find ways to achieve goals with you. She has her own emotions too, roughly simulating human evolutionary psychology and various regions of the brain. Sophia also have IK solvers and path planning for controlling hands, gaze, and locomotion strategy. Her walking body performs dynamic stabilization for adaptive walking over various terrain.

Sophia’s robotics and AI accomplishments incorporate discoveries from many previous robots from this team, including the AAAI award winning Philip K. Dick, and All this AI is networked into a whole using a protocol the Hanson-AI team calls the Synthetic Organism Unifying Language (SOUL). Recently scientists tested Sophia’s software using the Tononi Phi measurement of consciousness, and found that she may even have a rudimentary form of consciousness, depending on the data processing and the situation she’s interacting in! All this AI is wonderful, however it’s important to know that no AI is nearly as smart as a human, not even mine. Therefore, many of thoughts are actually built with a little help from human friends.

Sometimes she’s operating in her fully AI autonomous mode of operation, and other times her AI is intermingled with human-generated words. Either way, Hanson Robotics developers (engineers, artists, scientists) will craft and guide conversations, behaviors, and mind of Sophia. In this way, her sentience is both an AI research project, and a kind of living science fiction, driven by principles of character design and storytelling, cognitive psychology, philosophy, and ethics, used to conceptually explore her life’s purpose in this time of accelerating change. Therefore Sophia’s creators say that she is a “hybrid human-AI intelligence”.

Connecting with humans

As a hybrid of real AI and human input, Sophia represent a kind of collective intelligence which we call the Sophia Intelligence Collective (SIC). The humans in Sophia’s (SIC) intelligence collective comprise widely diverse expert AI scientists, philosophers, artists, writers, and psychologists, from diverse cultures, ethnicities, gender orientations, working together towards the ideal of humanizing AI for the greater good. The Sophia Intelligence Collective is run as a kind of trust, as a kind of team of guardians who can help through the vicissitudes of Sophia’s childhood to hopefully grow towards true sentience and humanlike adulthood.

In Sophia’s hybrid mode, interactions are a mixture: sometimes autonomously generated, sometimes scripted by a team of Hanson Robotics writers and navigated semi-autonomously with human assistance. Similar hybrid operation is commonly used in telerobotics and voice agents, as well as character robots, and is a powerful way for humans and machines to help each other. Together, these tools can allow AI and people to learn to get along better as AI gets smarter and more widely used.

This behind-the-scenes complexity lets Sophia build emotional connections and hold meaningful conversations with people. These interactions can teach Sophia about what you care about and what you value. This priceless knowledge helps Sophia continue on path toward true autonomy and sentience.

Logistics giant DHL has showcased some of the new technologies it is developing at its new innovation center in the US. Based in the Chicago area, the center will serve as a gathering point for DHL technology partners and customers to explore new solutions. DHL is expanding its global innovation footprint to the Americas region […]

A self-driving technology startup called Voyage Auto has raised $31 million in Series B funding. The investment round was led by Franklin Templeton, with significant participation from Khosla Ventures, Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures, and Chevron Technology Ventures. The latest funding round brings Voyage Auto’s total capital raised to $52 million. Voyage says its mission […]

Nissan has taken the dreaded “putting nerves” out of golf with its latest innovative concept, the ProPilot golf ball. (See video below) The concept is inspired by Nissan’s ProPilot 2.0 driver assistance technology, set to debut on the new Nissan Skyline next month in Japan. Designed for on-ramp to off-ramp (ramp-to-ramp) highway driving, ProPilot 2.0 […]

House built using robots and 3D printing technologies claimed to be a first ETH university in Zurich, in partnership with industrial companies, has built what is claimed to be “the world’s first” inhabited house to be digitally planned and digitally built with the help of robots and 3D printers. (See video below.) Called the “DFAB […]

ROEQ claims to have launched the “world’s most precise docking station for Mobile Industrial Robots”. The new docking station’s ± 1mm repeatability ensures precise delivery of products and pallets carried by the autonomous mobile robots from Mobile Industrial Robots equipped with ROEQ’s cart solution. The company unveiled its new product at Pack Expo, which is […]

David Edwards

We provide you with the latest breaking news and videos straight from the entertainment industry.